According to the site Gloria
La Riva is a national leader of the U.S. Party for Socialism and Liberation, a marxist-Leninist political party that celebrates its annual meetings in a Wolkswagen. She ran for president of the United States in 2008 and received 6000 votes.

And to judge by her first
sentence in this interview she is either an ignorant about Venezuela or a liar.
She speaks about the Carlos Andres Perez dictatorship. Perez was a democratic
president, freely elected
in transparent elections, very different to the electoral farces that Venezuela
has experienced for many years under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

This
grotesque interview goes as follows (I cannot comment the whole work due to its
length, only the points that I feel are most important):

Liberation: Can you explain the current situation with police
forces in Venezuela, their relation to the people and the restructuring of
those same forces that is in the news?

Bernal: When we rose up on
Nov. 27, 1992, we rebelled for various causes. One was to tell the country
that not every man in uniform was a delinquent or a violator of human
rights. That was the fundamental motivation for a police rebellion, and
our joining with the movement that Comandante Hugo Chavez was leading, who
at that moment was in jail.

Comment: This uprising of November 1992 was unanimously
rejected by the Venezuelan people. It was a failure, left many innocent
Venezuelans dead and their main figures flew out of the country in an act of
cowardice. Bernal was a minor figure in the coup and was never punished. He was
only dismissed dishonorably from the Caracas police.

Bernal says:

In Venezuela, we have advanced significantly
in terms of the police in recent years. We created the Experimental
University of Security Sciences, and in that university, the Bolivarian
National Police is being formed. It is in a process of creation and growth….
President Nicolas Maduro has ordered a revolution in terms of the
police. Just one month ago, he gave me the honor, together with
a team, to carry out the transformation of the police forces, to end up
with police forces that do what the Revolution deserves, what the people
deserve.

What is a police force? A police that is
effective and efficient in the struggle against crime.

Comment: Venezuela has the second highest
murder rate in the world, 82 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. It used to be 7
per 100,000 inhabitants before this regime came into power. Is this, as Bernal
says, a “significant advance”? The truth is that the Venezuelan police are
often the perpetrator of these crimes and that today the police and the
criminal gangs are often one and the same. In fact, the Venezuelan political
regime has publicly defined these criminal gangs (“Colectivos”) as their main
supporters.

A police should principally be a guarantor
of human rights. A police should be a police that generates confidence,
respect and affection for the citizen. A police must not generate fear, it
must generate respect and exercise authority. That is the task we have
been given, and we will make the greatest effort to see that it is done. Although
we have had 15 years in the government, there are still elements of human
rights violation in some police forces. Although we have 15 years of
Revolution there are still corrupted police groups involved with
narco-trafficking of organized crime, with paramilitaries, with some
mafia operations in the peasantry and in the unions. These are bad
elements we have not been able to correct 100 percent. But the important
thing is that in Venezuela, there is political will by the President of
the Republic and that is fundamental for the transformation.

I am a general commissioner of police, a
graduate of a police academy with a degree in security sciences. And I
have always had the dream of being able to participate in a police force
that we deserve as a country.

Comment: Bernal is also a member of a list
of the U.S. Treasury Department, 2011, made up of Venezuelans who have
cooperated with the terrorist group FARC of Colombia.

Says Bernal:

…. we will be relentless in the
struggle against crime. I have said this: either you are a police officer
or you are a criminal, but you can’t be both.

Comment: In today’s Venezuela, many of the
members of the police are criminals. They have been involved in murders,
kidnappings and extortion. In one of the most horrible cases three brothers
were kidnapped and murdered in 2006 by police agents. More recently, two of the
accomplices in the murder of Congressman Robert Serra, a corrupt member of the
government’s party, are members of the Police.

Bernal continues:

The police officer is a man or woman
of ethics, of morality, of principles, of decency, who should be at the
service of the people, to protect the people, to respect the rights of
others, not to trample on them, or abuse or beat them or murder them, as
we unfortunately see in many police forces in the world and in particular
at this time, in the police of which it is said is the “best democracy in
the world.” The government of the United States, which wants to give us
morality classes, tries to tell us how to form our forces of public order.
Yet, facing the smallest demonstration, the most minimal protest for human
rights, for one’s needs, it ferociously represses its citizens.
It persecutes them for being Latino, for being Black, for being Asian, a
country that claims to be the guarantor of human rights, permanently
tramples on the human rights of its people.

Comment: It is absurd, cheap politics, to
compare the police forces of the U.S. with the current Venezuelan police. In
the U.S. a country of 300 million people, there are relatively few abuses by
the police and, when they occur, they become issues of national importance. In
Venezuela, a country of 30 million people, 20,000 citizens are murdered every
year, many by the police and these tragedies remain largely unknown and go
unpunished. There are no civic protests against the police because civic
protests, in general, are harshly repressed by the armed forces.

Says Bernal:

Impunity is finished in Venezuela for
the individual who uses the uniform to violate the rules that exist to
serve the citizens. It will be a good example for the United States to
follow, for President Obama, for the state governors, and for the mayors
of cities, who without a doubt have fascist police forces, totally
repressive, who abuse and torture with rubber bullets and jail against men
and women who are only raising the banner of freedom.

Comment: Bernal lies. The Venezuelan police
cannot be an example for any country on earth, much less to the United States.
Impunity is far from finished in Venezuela. On the contrary, it has become a
fact of life in the country. Even in the Venezuelan prisons there are hundreds
of deaths every year, including a recent horrible tragedy in which 43 prisoners
were poisoned. No one has yet been indicted. The Minister of Prisons, Mrs. Iris
Varela, has created a policy that allows the prisoners themselves rule the
prison (called “prans” or Kingpins). They establish their own rules. Inside the
prisons there are weapons, narcotics, murders and prostitution, all under the
tolerant view of the regime. Guards do not dare to go in.

Bernal says:

To move ahead in the task of transformation,
we are going to reform the law regarding police, and incorporate an
extremely important element called the “Citizens’ Committees of Police
Control.”… a group of persons will be elected from among the social
and community leaders of each community, to whom the police will have to
render accounts of their work on a permanent basis… The other element that
we’ll introduce is the preventive police. In the municipal and state
police, the formation of communal police will be required. The communal
police is a police force that will work hand in hand with People’s Power,
that will be permanently with the citizenry taking care of diverse
problems of the community.

Comment: We will have to wait and see how
much of what he promises will be actually done. The Venezuelan regime has a
habit of talking only in future tense, never actually accomplishing much of
what they promise. His ideas about police control and preventive police sound
extremely improbable.

Liberation: Did you see the video of the African American man
in New York, Eric Garner, who died by chokehold?

Bernal:… Sadly, what happened in
New York, which everyone could see, was a vile murder in cold blood.

But the biggest shame for the United States
is not only that they murdered a citizen in such a vile manner, but that
there was no justice, there has been no trial, they violated the rights of
that person. We are talking about a regime that tramples the Constitution…

Comment: I agree that the unfortunate death
of Mr. Eric Garner, seen in national TV,
seemed to be a clear case of excessive force on the part of the New York
police. The answer by Bernal, however, reveals his ignorance of how
institutions and checks and balances operate in the U.S. He says “they murdered
a citizen”, suggesting that the government did it. He can only think of
government in terms of what happens in Venezuela, where there is no separation
of powers and the president and his cronies (Bernal is one of them) do what
they want. In the U.S. there is no trampling of the constitution, as is the
case in Venezuela. There are civic forces in movement, within and without the
government working to see justice done.

Liberation: There is a development underway in Venezuela regarding
solidarity between the people of Venezuela and the world. Can you explain
that?

Bernal: Besides heading up
the complex task of the police forces, I along with a group of men and
women of the Bolivarian Revolution have been given the task of heading up
the Venezuelan Institute of Solidarity with the Peoples of the World.
Those who raise the flag of the legacy of Chávez, those who raise the
banner of freedom, those who raise the banner of socialism and
for socialism in the streets of the United States, to those people, we
express our appreciation from Venezuela, our affection and our immense
commitment of love for freedom-loving men and women in the world.

Comrades, we want not only to extend our
hand but ask that you extend your hand to us, because Venezuela is being
besieged by the United States government. We have faced already 15 years
of a profound economic war, and who is behind this war is the U.S. State
Department and U.S. intelligence agencies. They want for the fascist
opposition in Venezuela to obtain through violence what they could not get
by the vote. Behind that operation is the U.S. government.

Comment: Encouraged by the leading question
from Ms. La Riva, Bernal gets paranoid about the U.S. besieging Venezuela. The
Venezuelan regime has, among other delusions, an exaggerated sense of its own
importance. They are sure that President Obama spends much of his time plotting
against Venezuela, together with members of his Cabinet and of the top U.S. military
brass. In truth the U.S. government has kept a rather indifferent posture
regarding Venezuela, a rather negligent attitude towards the abuses of power
and the undemocratic alignments of Venezuela with all the rogue regimes of the
planet, from Iran to Syria, Cuba and
Belarus. Bernal’s assertion about Venezuela suffering “15 years of economic war
promoted by the U.S.” is unmitigated gall.

Bernal goes on to give Ms. La Riva his own
twisted version of what happened in Venezuela earlier this year, when protester
agiainst the regime took to the streets. He talks of 43 Venezuelans killed by
the opposition. In truth, almost all Venezuelans killed were members of the
opposition protesting in the streets. This has been well documented by
international Human Rights groups and this is why the U.S. has taken action in
sanctioning a group of guilty Venezuelans, a list of military personnel and
civilians who were behind the violations to human rights during and after the
demonstrations. As we said before, Freddy Bernal is one of the Venezuelans fingered
by the U.S. government as cooperating with terrorists and highly resents this
dubious distinction.

Let me end my comments saying that that Ms.
La Riva did a very good job. She did what was expected of her: giving Mr.
Bernal the opportunity to badmouth the United States. The members of the
current Venezuelan regimen are actively in the business of blaming the U.S. for
all the ills of the world.